Title: TTGELS: a new approach for solving university exam timetabling problem by using gravitational emulation local search algorithm

Authors: Majid Nikougoftar Nategh; Ali Asghar Rahmani Hosseinabadi; Sedigheh Damavandi; Valentina Emilia Balas

Addresses: Department of Information Technology, University of Qom, Qom Branch, Qom, Iran ' Young Researchers and Elite Club, Ayatollah Amoli Branch, Islamic Azad University, Amol, Iran ' E-learning School, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran ' Aurel Vlaicu' University, Bd. Revolutiei 77, 310130, Arad, Romania

Abstract: University exam timetabling problem is one of the NP-hard problems that challenge universities all over the world. Thus, different methods have been proposed to solve this problem by using heuristic algorithm. In this paper, a new method named TTGELS has been proposed to solve the university exam timetabling problem by using gravitational emulation local search algorithm. The proposed method is compared with other methods and results indicate that the proposed method could produce better results but it needs more time to execute, that's because of using neighbourhood production process and multiple stepping method to produce better solutions.

Keywords: university exams; exam timetabling; gravitational emulation local search; GELS algorithm; velocity; Newton law; universities; neighbourhood production; multiple stepping.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSYSE.2016.081377

International Journal of Computational Systems Engineering, 2016 Vol.2 No.4, pp.183 - 189

Received: 26 Feb 2016
Accepted: 06 Apr 2016
Published online: 06 Jan 2017 *

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